I have a premium subscription membership on LinkedIn (Sales Navigator) and with one of its features I can go back and see everyone who viewed my profile in the past ninety days.
I use this feature every day as I consider a profile view to be a plausible and legitimate reason to contact someone. And I like seeing lists of people that, for one reason or another, have taken an interest in me.
But while doing my daily look through earlier this week, I saw that some profile views listed sources and some didn’t. So I decided to go back through my profile viewers and look at the sources I could find, and see if there was anything I could learn from them.
I wound up reviewing the last 300 people who visited my profile and looking to see where they came from, that is, how they found my profile.
42 of them – around 14% – were connections. This may seem odd but is completely legitimate. I can’t tell you the number of times I have gone to a connections’ profile to check something. I can think of three times I have done it today already.
That leaves 258 people who were not connected with me.
And of that 258 profile viewers, 7 found me via Search on LinkedIn.
Seven. Less than one person a week.
Everyone else discovered me because of something I did.
They saw something I had published, they saw I had commented or engaged with someone else’s content or someone @mentioned me. The screen grab at the top of today’s newsletter shows my number of profile viewers going up and down over the course of this summer. The peaks correlate with the days I publish this newsletter.
The conclusion I draw from this little nugget of research? If you want to get discovered on LinkedIn, I have two words of advice for you:
Do something.
There are two ways to broaden your reach – that is to increase the number of people who are aware of you on LinkedIn. One is to be discovered in a search and the other is to be reacted to after you do something on LinkedIn.
In my case publishing and engaging with other people is more than 35 times as effective as being found via LinkedIn Search.
If I relied on search alone, I would likely have a couple dozen people discovering me this year.
Now, you may not want more reach, and you may not want people discovering you. But if you do, your Profile isn’t going to do it for you, your activity is.
Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.
Then again, I have been doing this for over ten years. That’s longer than 97.5% of LinkedIn employees have been with LinkedIn (based on a search I did with Sales Navigator).
Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer, or the statistic) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/
